The proliferation of cloud-based services have impacted the way personal and corporate electronically stored information objects (e.g., files, images, videos, etc.) are stored, and has also impacted the way such personal and corporate content is shared and managed. One benefit of using such cloud-based platforms is the ability to securely share large volumes of content among trusted collaborators over a variety of user devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptop computers, desktop computers, and/or other devices. A large enterprise with thousands of users (e.g., employees) and many terabytes of content might use a cloud-based content storage platform to efficiently and securely facilitate content access to various individual users and/or collaborative groups of users. In such cases, a user can access a large volume of objects stored in the cloud-based platform from a user device that might store merely a small portion of that volume locally. Further, multiple users (e.g., collaborators) can access certain shared objects for various collaborative purposes (e.g., co-development, audience presentation, etc.).
Unfortunately, legacy techniques for managing remote cloud-based content on a local user device are limited at least as pertains aspects of access latency, versioning, collaboration efficiency, and/or other factors. Some legacy approaches rely on specialized user interfaces and/or application programming interfaces (APIs) to access cloud-based content from a user device. For example, such user interfaces and/or APIs might be presented in a browser to facilitate a user to navigate through the cloud-based objects (e.g., files) to access and/or operate upon the objects.
Such legacy approaches might merely enable a user to download one or more objects from the cloud-based storage to the local storage and file system native to the operating system (OS) of the user device. The user might then use the native file system to manipulate the objects using various applications on the user device. In such cases, however, the user can experience a significant access latency (e.g., delay before performing operation on a file) corresponding to the download of certain large objects. Further, the storage limitations of the user device might limit the number of objects that can be concurrently managed locally. In some cases, the objects downloaded to local memory use user device resources, usage of which device resources often detract from the performance of the user device. With some legacy approaches, collaborators associated with a certain shared object might not be notified of local operations (e.g., editing) on the shared object among other collaborators until an entire edited object has been uploaded from a user device and committed to the cloud-based storage. In other cases, certain collaborators might be locked out from any access (e.g., viewing) to a shared object when the object is being accessed by another collaborator. Such issues with legacy approaches can impact collaboration efficiency and/or effectiveness.
What is needed is a technique or techniques to improve over legacy and/or over other considered approaches. Some of the approaches described in this background section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.